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Category Archives: Baths

All in the interest of product testing it’s been bath time in Ashbourne for the last couple of weeks. 2-3 times a week Austin and I immerse ourselves in homemade bath melts, salts and milk powders (mind, not at the same time 😉 ). It’s not going to take long and we’ll develop gills and webs. Seriously.

As per usual some things are great and work at the first try – some need more refinement. Let me share with you a great recipe I found for bath melts which I have tried out but needed to tweak. Note that if you want to be very posh you can also call them “bath truffles” – I did so a couple of times until Austin called me an ejeet and I decided it was safer using the terminology “melt” instead (if you are unfamiliar with the local tongue “ejeet” is defined by the urban dictionary as: A person of lower intellectual abilities. A fool. Used as a colloquial term in Ireland. 😀 )

Lavender Camomile Bath Melts

50 gr. cocoa butter

50 gr. shea butter

1 table spoon almond oil

1 tea spoon dried lavender buds (taken from my front garden!)

1 tea spoon camomile tea (dry)

A couple of drops of lavender essential oil

A silicone mould for ice cubes (in my case they are heart shaped)

Putting it together: Grate the cocoa butter and melt over low heat with the shea butter. Once melted add the almond oil, the lavender buds and camomile tea (just cut the tea bag and stir contents in). Add about 5-6 drops of lavender essential oil to the mix last. Get your mould and add a drop of essential oil at the bottom of each form. Spoon mixture in and put into the fridge until solid. I usually leave it in over night.

So this is the original recipe which sounds great, right? When I used it in the bath, however, I was less than impressed with the floating bits and pieces of lavender buds and camomile. Apart from the fact that the buds were sort of scratchy the oils are very heavy and all the floaty bits stick to you like they are glued on. I found myself twisting and turning in bed later like the princess on the pea trying to locate yet another piece of lavender that I had failed to remove previously. Hence, I re-melted all of the bath melts again and strained them through a sieve. Going forward there’ll be no scratchy and annoying solids in my bath melts. Also, I’ll slightly amend the recipe using less cocoa butter and up the amounts of shea butter and almond oil to make the melt a bit “lighter” on the skin. Bath melts go a long way in a bath tub so one (instead of two as used by me) will do for one full bath.

We’ll pack the bath melts into our gift boxes that we’ll bring to the Trim Xmas market on December 8. What else is to be expected there? Bath milk sets! There will be lovely 3 pack (lavender, rose and jasmine) and 4 pack (almond, chocolate, vanilla and caramel) bath milk sets that will make you feel great and smell – to borrow from Jamie Oliver – delish! Sneak preview below.